By Katie Sanchez, Outgoing Editor-in-Chief

As I prepare to graduate, I bid a bittersweet farewell to the Xavier Newswire. Reflecting back on my four years of collegiate journalism and college overall, I am so proud of all the work my team and I have accomplished.

One of the biggest challenges Newswire has faced in my time here has been engaging with a hyper-digital generation and getting them to read and care about issues local to them. Frankly, journalism is difficult when attention spans are getting shorter and shorter.

I’ve been inspired by the countless stories I’ve read and written in the past for years about students working on and off campus to better the world and explore their campus. At the same time, however, I’m worried about studies that argue that Generation Z “are the loneliest, least resilient demographic alive today.” Gen Z-ers report the highest levels of stress and worry about the future.

Certainly, Gen Z gets its fair share of hate and criticism from the eternal “older generation hates younger generation” cycle, but Gen Z cannot be entirely to blame for its perceived shortcomings — we’ve inherited a bad economy, skyrocketing home costs and a surge of political instability. For many, COVID-19 shut us inside during formative years, so I understand the struggles of loneliness and isolation that many Gen Z-ers feel.

However, Gen Z cannot sit down and take the situation that has been handed to us without a fight. Doomscrolling eats away our time, makes us more self-conscious and anxious and erodes our attention spans. This isn’t by accident — corporations and those in power have everything to benefit from you being disconnected and isolated, scrolling and watching and buying their products endlessly.

Gen Z grew up hearing that they would be the ones to save the world – to fix the environment, to end injustice and make the world better. Certainly, Gen Z loves to have an opinion and post about injustice online. However, if you look at recent protests, for example, you’ll notice that the crowds are typically, predominantly older. We give older people a lot of sh*t for the world they gave us, but a lot of them do show up when it matters.

Without a doubt, many Gen Z-ers are doing important, real-world work. But there has to be more. Gen Z needs to get engaged and read more than Instagram infographics. We have to take control of our world and actually act on change instead of leaving judgy TikTok comments about who is the most woke.

This isn’t a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality. Gen Z got dealt a bad hand and that sucks, but we also have so much potential. This is about taking agency and not letting old, rich powerful people ruin the future for us while numbing us to the pain.

I know that I sound like an old person yelling at the sky. But the truth is, I’m worried about looking back in a couple decades and realizing that Gen Z never reached its potential as a world-changing generation.

You don’t even have to be a revolutionary – it makes a difference just to be engaged and care. Get outside and do things that scare you. If you’re an underclassman, live your next years of college so that you have no regrets about wasted time by the time you’re graduating. If you’re graduating, think about how you can use this weird and scary time to set up a life that’s better for yourself and others.

I don’t know what you should do, but the worst thing to do is to not care.